ABSTRACT
The traditional economic crisis associated with poor harvests and distribution difficulties had the effect of stimulating substantial increases in the prices of the basic necessities of diet at a time when more and more people were dependent on purchases in the market and when incomes of all kinds were under pressure. A moral conception of economic relationships quite different from that of the long-developing capitalist system, frequently survived to provide justification for protest. The analysis of subsistence crises – the last of the traditional subsistence crises – reveals both elements of continuity with the historical past and the beginnings of a rapid process of transition to a new and recognizably more modern economic system. The ancien regime economique was drawing to a close.
